Help, my / is 97% filled up
 

Hi!
Here is my problem -
I have partitioned my hard disk as follows for Slackware -
/dev/hda5 2.8 gb mounted as /
/dev/hda6 2.8 gb mounted as /home

Now my problem is that my / partition is 97% filled up.Is there any way I can safely remove unwanted clutter that may have accumalated in the tmp directory or other unwanted files safely without breaking my system. I have two more partitions /dev/hda9 and /dev/hda10 2.8 gb each. Is there a way I can expand my / partition?

Eagerly awaiting a reply and thanking in advance,

I once had a similar problem with /tmp files. But be careful: Do you have /usr on its own partition? If /usr is on its own partition, you probably have less of a problem.

No I don't have a separate partition for /usr. However, as mentioned earliear I have 2 partitions of nearly 3 GB each which are not mounted and are kept vacant for future use.
Can I now mount one of those as /usr?

Was / 97% full when you first installed? If so, then moving /usr onto its own partition could make sense.

If / was not 97% full when you did your install, but has grown to that size over time, then you might want to do some weed-whacking in /var/log. There could be an accumulation of old log files that have been rotated and compressed. Log files that are over a month or two old are probably no longer of any interest and could be deleted or moved onto a CD for archiving.

Take care to not delete /var/log/packages :)

Maybe you should use a separate partition for /var rather than for /usr

I usually try to uninstall stuff that I don't use.

Thanks all of you.
I have now removed all the unnecessary packages that I never use. Now my / partition is only 92% filled up.
/var/log/removed-packages/ folder is huge, can I empty it without breaking my system?

yes. It's there for info. I find it easiest to keep it mostly empty anyway.

also be carefull with p2p applications like gtk-gnutella as they created .BAD files, files that are not downloaded correctly or incomplete. It once filled 3G of space overnight while d/l only ONE mp3 file.

The used disk space shouldn't exceed 90%, else you're going to have fragmentation problems

du -sh /usr
du -sh /var

them you can have a beter ideia of the size of each folder....

Be sure to check log files iv /var/log

I have found it can grow hundreds of megs if not deleted regulary.
Even with logrotate.

I was checking this just out of curiosity and I found this:

can I safely erase those files? they are just logs ...

you can definitely delete the .n logs, but if a problem shows up in the near future, you will probably want to keep the current ones around. A good schedule might be to delete a log a week or so after it gets rotated.

got it. Thanks a lot tuxdev! :cool: